


225. tv static

by piggy09



Series: The Sestre Daily Drabble Project [132]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-09
Updated: 2016-11-09
Packaged: 2018-08-30 00:14:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8511367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: The stranger doesn’t say thank you or here’s how I survived the storm that has killed off the world or even her name; she just eats and eats and eats until almost all the food is gone. Then she stops.





	

In one of the breaks in the storm the front door to Sarah’s house crashes open and a woman stumbles inside, all goggles and scarf-wrappings and hunched scavenger-posture. She slams the door shut. She pulls a bow and arrow off her back – the _fuck_ – and aims an arrow at Sarah.

Sarah raises her hands, instinctively. She doesn’t even have her gun; she put it away three weeks into the storm, when she thought that everyone outside was – well. _Was_ is the right word. She put the gun away when everyone in her life moved into past-tense.

“Who the hell are you,” she rasps with her dead-gone unused voice. “How’d you survive out there.”

The stranger doesn’t say anything. She shoves up her goggles to reveal a desperate pair of pink-rimmed eyes, shoves down one of the scarves over her mouth and then just stands there and shakes.

“Food,” she says finally. The bowstring makes a shiver-sound as she pulls it further back.

“Fine,” Sarah says. “There isn’t – there isn’t much left.”

“ _Food_ ,” says the stranger again, insistently. There’s traces of an accent clinging to her voice.

“O _kay_ ,” Sarah says. She leads them to the kitchen.

\--

The stranger doesn’t say _thank you_ or _here’s how I survived the storm that has killed off the world_ or even her name; she just eats and eats and eats until almost all the food is gone. Then she stops. She’s still a little shaky. She unwraps her layers of scarves and gloves and what looks like animal skins and then she’s just: a woman, small and bony and horribly alive.

Sarah leans against the doorframe, arms crossed. What the hell do you say at a time like this.

“You got a name?” she tries.

The stranger blinks at the food remnants, picks up a wrapper and licks a stripe along the inside of it like she thinks there’ll be food left. There isn’t. Her tongue is very pink. It slips back into her mouth, and she says: “Helena.”

“Sarah.”

“You live here,” says Helena, eyes skittering up and down Sarah’s body like she’s trying to dissect her.

“I do now.”

That makes Helena smile, a warped thing that stretches out her mouth. “I do too.”

\--

She makes the same inspection of the house that Sarah did. She finds the same thing that Sarah did: nothing of any use. Sarah can hear her moving around the house, the static as she turns on the television and realizes – like Sarah did – that all the channels are long gone. The plumbing works. The lights don’t. Helena presses play on the CD player that Sarah ignored; some bubblegum boy band starts crooning from the other end of the house. It’s a terrible sound, the way it echoes off the building storm outside.

“Can you – turn that off?” Sarah yells, making her way to the other room. She screeches to a halt, self-righteousness sputtering out, when she sees Helena curled in a ball on the floor.

“They’re all gone,” Helena says. “All of them are gone. I looked. I went to every house and they were all gone. Bye-bye.”

Sarah swallows. “I’m here,” she whispers.

Helena looks at her, eyes two bottomless holes. “I am too,” she whispers back. She smiles, just a little; it looks like it hurts.

\--

Sarah goes to sleep in the master bedroom. She doesn’t know where Helena goes – only she does at some point before dawn, when Helena crawls into her bed. She buries her face between Sarah’s shoulderbones. Her chin is bony; her arms are bony where they wrap around Sarah. She’s all sharp points and jagged edges. She is the most comforting thing Sarah has ever known.

“Say something,” Sarah whispers.

“I don’t know any somethings,” Helena whispers back. She starts humming instead, some sour off-tune lullaby. Sarah closes her eyes. She lets herself fall asleep.

\--

When Sarah wakes up in the morning Helena is gone. Sarah checks every room of the house, all the small spaces. She’s gone. There is a blinding moment that Sarah knows it: she’s lost it, she’s gone over the deep end, she’s finally hallucinating like every shitty movie she’s ever seen about being alone.

The realization makes her sit on the floor, right where Helena was, and start crying. Outside the storm wails, like it understands.

\--

They’re – she’s running low on food, since Helena ate it or since Sarah ate it or, who knows, why the fuck not, since the fairies took it. Since the storm became a person and walked into Sarah’s house and took away one of the few things she has left.

There isn’t enough food to make it much longer. A few weeks, maybe. Maybe a little longer if she guzzles water and never moves again.

Sarah is staring at what she has left – an uninspiring row of boxes – when the door crashes open again, and Helena comes back. Sarah thinks it, _Helena’s back_ , stands up and runs for the door and sees Helena lugging in an entire deer. She’s bleeding from the storm that’s howling at a deafening volume outside. The deer looks stunned, terrified.

“You came back,” Sarah yells.

“Close the door,” Helena yells back.

Sarah does. The world is suddenly too quiet.

“I thought you were gone,” she says, voice soft but still too loud in all that goddamn quiet.

“I live here now,” Helena says. It sounds like a question.

“Yeah,” Sarah says. “I guess you do.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


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